Math lessons

Last weekend my husband and I Skyped with our son and his son, who is growing like the Dow.

"Hey, Mom, check this out," said our son as he gave his 4-year-old a simple math problem to do.

We sipped our coffees expectantly.

"What's two plus two?" he asked, the proud father.

We watched as our little guy concentrated on forming his fingers on his right and left hands into two Vs to help him figure out the answer. His bright brow furrowed as he counted.

"Four!" he said happily.

"That's right," said our son.

"Wow, very good," Papa said.

I clapped and cheered. I was thinking how great it was that his dad was already introducing him to the wonderful world of math.

"What's three plus three?" he asked while our grandson again used his fingers like abacuses. We observed as he counted his small digits to nail the right answer.

"Six! This is fun!" he said smiling from ear to ear. He was getting into it.

"Hey, Mom, want me to test you?"

Suddenly, I was back in high school and the words of my algebra teacher echoed. I was always asking for extra help in math.

"It takes a few tries, but once you get it ..."

His statement added up to me wanting to avoid math altogether. I didn't like the feeling not being good at math gave me. Still I hung in there, averaging Cs, the occasional B, never an A, and even a D to my dismay.

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Then it was on to algebra II, and then geometry, and trigonometry, the last, which I finally begged to drop and did.

Homework was a struggle; there was no one who could help me with high-level math, and after dropping trig I steered clear of anything requiring formulas. I justified this line of thinking by complaining and questioning, what good is "all that math" anyway?

Nonetheless, my son's math challenge had me curious. How much had I really remembered? I agreed to try.

"Be gentle," I said.

"OK, Mom, how do you find circumference?"

"Uh, multiply the radius times itself multiplied by pi?"

"Not bad," he said, 'Try this one."

He drew a triangle with a three on the shortest side, a four on the next side, and said, "Figure out what C is." That was the longest side.

a-squared + b-squared = c-squared; in this case a was three and b was four.

I started scratching out numbers and after a lot of figuring I came up with a very large number. I answered without thinking.

"Mom, that doesn't even make any sense," he said, adding, "Look at the triangle!"

He was right. There was no way that C could equal that much.

"Just estimate it," he said.

"I don't know... five?' I asked, guess-timating.

"Yes!" my son said. He sighed explaining that common sense applies.

Angles, legs, the Pythagorean theorem, it was like a mysterious language.

"Mom, in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides," he said in his engineer way.

Then he held up an algebraic equation, which I copied.

2x-squared + 16 = 0

I stared at the problem. It had been more than 35 years since I had done algebra. I thought, well... 2 x squared has to equal negative 16 ... which when added to 16 would give you zero ... but how do you do that? I was puzzled.

"This can't work," I said, shaking my head.

After a few more tries and coming up absolutely empty-handed my son smiled.

"Mom, I threw you a curveball. It's an imaginary number, there is no answer."

"So, I was right!" I said to my son who was leaning forward in my Skype screen. He wasn't buying it.

"Give me another one," I said, with my newfound false bravado.

"Daddy, give me some more math too," piped up our grandson, "a harder one this time." Then just like that, "Grammy, want to watch a show with me?"

"Thank you for asking, but, let's stick with math," I said.

My son wrote:

3x-squared + 2x = 100

"Whenever you look at an equation," he instructed, "look for like terms or common multiples."

Oh, boy.

He lost me when he started talking about polynomial equations and the opposite of square roots. I thought I had it, but what is it with math and me?

The words of my seventh-grade algebra teacher were canceling out my confidence. Are some people just better at math than others?

An article in Huffington Post this week called "Some People Just Born Good At Math, Study Shows" caught my attention. On Thursday of last week it had already been shared 837 times and 3,163 people had already liked it.

Is it possible that I was born "good" at math, but just never gave it a chance?

Researcher Melissa Libertus of Johns Hopkins University said in a statement, "... we believe that 'number sense' is universal, whereas math ability has been thought to be highly dependent on culture and language and takes many years to learn."

The article by Amanda Chan concludes kids with good number sense might have an easier time learning math and because of this do well in school; on the other hand, children with less-than-impressive number sense might simply end up avoiding math-related activities early on, leading to poorer performance in school because of lack of practice.

Aha!

The article had me clicking on a link to the Panamath test, which measures your Approximate Number System (ANS) aptitude. It asked me to guess if there were more blue dots or yellow dots in a brief flash. Supposedly this test tells us a lot about the accuracy of our basic gut sense for numbers. And it's so simple, even a 51-year-old with an aversion to math can do it, even a 2-year-old can play. I scored 93 percent accuracy.

Maybe there is hope. Maybe I just had to tap my inborn ability for math. Maybe ... I just needed more practice.

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